Senior Distributed Systems Engineer - Services Special Projects

At Apple, great ideas turn into phenomenal products, services, and customer experiences at a pace few companies can match. We're looking for an experienced backend engineer to design and build massively scalable, highly available services that power experiences for Apple customers. As a senior member of the Services Engineering Team, You'll build and operate high-throughput, low-latency backend services that ingest, process, and serve data at scale across a range of mission-critical workloads — from real-time transactions to analytics and content delivery. You'll also help evolve a multi-tenant platform, including AI/ML-powered services, by shipping new capabilities, scaling what exists, and applying distributed-systems best practices from design through production. Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field 8+ years of professional software development experience building scalable, distributed systems in production Experience building, authoring, and operating large-scale, multi-tiered distributed systems and customer-facing web services: including API design, authentication, authorization, scaling for high availability, concurrency, and reliability. Strong understanding of concurrency and multi-threaded programming, fundamental data structures, and efficient algorithm design Strong proficiency in Java; working knowledge of a second systems language (Go, C++) is a plus. Solid OO analysis and design skills. Strong proficiency in application frameworks (Spring boot) Hands on experience with JVM performance tuning and profiling - GC selection/tuning, JFR, async-profiler, heap/thread-dump analysis for low-latency services. Hands-on with async and reactive JVM stacks: Netty, Project Reactor, RxJava, Vert.x, or Micronaut/Quarkus. Rigorous testing discipline with JUnit 5, Mockito, AssertJ, Testcontainers, and contract testing. Hands on experience with build and dependency management with Gradle Deep understanding of transactional consistency models - ACID semantics, with deep knowledge of tradeoffs between relational and NoSQL database technologies Expertise with synchronous and asynchronous network I/O and RPC frameworks (gRPC) Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) for automated testing, build, and deployment of production services. Experience with AWS or GCP and cloud-native tooling (Docker, Kubernetes) in the context of deploying scalable production grade services. Experience with event streaming and queueing systems (specifically Kafka) and stream processing frameworks and high-throughput, append-only write paths for durable, queryable historical records. Hands on Experience of leveraging data storage (Iceberg, Cassandra) and caching technologies (Redis) in Production services Hands on experience with Serialization/schema tooling: Jackson, Protobuf, Avro, and Schema Registry Experience identifying, triaging, and remediating security vulnerabilities in production services (dependency management, secure code review, threat modeling).